IN THE REVIEW

transcribed and edited by Paul H. Barrett and Peter J. Gautrey and Sandra Herbert and David Kohn and Sydney Smith

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin Volume 3: 1844–1846

edited by Frederick Burkhardt, edited by Sydney Smith

Sir Peter Medawar once described the scientific paper as a fraud. His point was not that the scientific paper misrepresents nature (though of course it may), but rather that it misrepresents science. Typically, a scientific paper presents a formal and highly idealized account of research, written according to a set …